October 16th, 2016 | Yo-Yo

Alexander added a new word to his vocabulary today: “Yo-Yo.”Alexander looking at a new bilingual picture book.

Kaohsiung. Taiwan.

Clear skies. 26°c.

Sunday.

8:15 a.m. Laundromat. Time to do the weekly bedding wash and a couple of clothes. $130NT.

830 a.m. Picked up some breakfast for me, Chia and Alexander from the nearby breakfast bar and took home while waiting for the laundry to wash. $150NT.

Although the weather is good. The local air quality is not too fresh. There is a bit of haze floating around this morning. The air is still so nothing is getting blown away. It probably drifted over from China. It must be terrible living over there in such a polluted country.

10:00 a.m. Laundry is finished. Now back at home. Gave Alexander some new bilingual picture books today. They are about everyday items with both English and Chinese. The Chinese has the Taiwanese alphabet next to it. In school children first learn the Taiwanese alphabet which is a system of symbols that represent different phonical sounds.

There are 49 symbols used in the Taiwanese Hokkien language. The symbols are called Bopomofo. They are used to phonetically sound out Chinese characters. The symbols also have an English alphabet equivalent sound. Two examples phonic symbols are: ㄅ sounds like “B “and ㄚ sounds like “Ah”. Together ㄅㄚ is prounced Bah. Bah Bah means father. (oh, if you don’t have a chinese language pack installed the above phonetics may appear as [x].’s.)

12:00 pm ~ 1:30 p.m. Skyped mum and dad. They are getting closer to their ocean cruise on the 26th. So they are getting excited. It does sound like a great adventure. We are only here for a short time in comparison to the timeline of life on earth. So it’s good if you can ‘see the world’ when you have the chance. Or at least escape your home town for a while and experience the beauty of our home and planet.

6:30 p.m. Alexander has a small English vocabulary. ‘Apple’, ‘Banana’, ‘Thankyou’, ‘Bye-Bye’ and now ‘Yo-Yo’. May not seem much of a feat but for a young child his age living in a multilingual environment (English, Manadrin and Taiwanese) it’s not too bad.